The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Wired Magazine's report on that bizarro Ferarri crash
Say what you want about blogs, there's still room in the world for engaging journalism, such as Randall Sullivan's report on that bizarro Ferarri crash that started out as a spectacular event but turned out merely to be the entry into a much more complex and intriguing world. (via BoingBoing.) (Recent development: Eriksson turns down a plea deal. Interesting that he spoke through an interpreter.)
How do I shut down a workstation via Remote Desktop?
When you are connected to a workstation via Remote Desktop, the "Turn Off Computer" option changes to "Disconnect". But what if you really want to turn off the computer, hibernate it, or put it on stand-by? Note: These tips work on Windows XP, but there is no guarantee that they will work in future versions of Windows. One way to do this is to run Task Manager and select your shutdown option from the "Shut Down" menu. Another trick is to click on the desktop and type Alt+F4. This will call up the shutdown dialog, where you get the usual shutdown options like "Shut down", "Shut down without installing upda...
No good deed goes unpunished, part 2
Sometimes you're better off keeping your fool mouth shut. When I reply to a question on an internal discussion list, often with a clarifying question rather than an answer, it will occasionally happen that the person I replied to will send a response directly to me rather than including the discussion list. This is bad for a few reasons. When somebody does this, I typically forward the message back to the discussion list with a message like "I wish they'd fix that Exchange Server bug where the discussion list keeps getting deleted from the 'To' line." This is a little joke that I use to avoid directly accusi...
Dead Sea Scrolls lectures available online (or in person if you can get there)
As I noted last year, the Dead Sea Scrolls are in Seattle, and in conjunction with the exhibition is a series of eleven lectures at Town Hall. Tonight's lecture is The Dead Sea Scrolls, Jesus & The Da Vinci Code. These lectures are rebroadcast on The Seattle Channel, and it appears that the city also makes the video available via streaming media. It takes a few weeks for them to make it to the archive page, though. The first lecture in the series, Dead Sea Scrolls: Early Judaism and the Births of Christianity just went up. Fascinating stuff.
Don't require your users to have a degree in philosophy
Help text is not the place to put logic puzzles. In Windows Vista, when you go to the System control panel, you are shown a number that describes your computer's rating. But are higher numbers better or worse? If I had a choice, would it be better to have a 1 rating or a 5 rating? In earlier betas of Windows Vista, you had to have a degree in philosophy to figure this out. If you clicked the "Help" button on the System control panel page, you were sent to a page of help text that tried to explain the performance rating. When it got around to explaining what the number means, the text said, p...
Answering phones at KUOW for their Fall 2006 pledge drive
I spent Saturday evening as a volunteer answering the phone for one of our local public radio stations, KUOW. This was the first time I had worked a pledge drive, and it was a fun experience. I was there sort of as an honorary member of a group of friends who get together every week for drinks; they decided to volunteer for the pledge drive as a fun change of pace. Here's sort of how the evening goes: You'll be sitting there at the table chatting with your friends, and then a phone rings and the conversation instantly stops while somebody took a call. By the time the call is over, everybody had forgotten what th...
What does the letter "T" in LPTSTR stand for?
The "T" in comes from the "T" in . I don't know for certain, but it seems pretty likely that it stands for "text". By comparison, the "W" in probably comes from the C language standard, where it stands for "wide".
Raymond's excursions into East Asian pop music, episode 4: Yuki
When my story left off, a colleague of mine had dedicated himself to finding some good Japanese pop music, and what he found was this music video of the song JOY by Japanese pop star Yuki Isoya, who performs under the stage name YUKI. The video was mesmerizing. The Flash Gordon extras. The dance steps. The blinking. The hyperventilating. (Though I don't think the blue dress suits her; she's not a teenager any more.) But the best part is the retransition from the middle section. After the wiggling fingers, she just leans into the big note and swings her arms in, well, joy. I have no idea what she's saying, b...
640 x 480 is still not dead
Windows still has to worry about displays running at 640×480 resolution. Even though the default minimum resolution was bumped up to 800×600 for Windows XP, there are still 640×480 devices out there, typically tiny monitors on servers. One common set-up is to have a bank of tiny little monitors, each corresponding to one server in a cluster, with one large monitor that can "tap into" any of the tiny monitors for a closer look. Even though these servers typically are managed via remote administration, keeping actual monitors available acts as a safety net when remote administration proves in...